Ruth Smith

speaker

216 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 7 May

Ruth Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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In Our Time · Handel's Messiah · 7 May 2026 podcast

He was in a form of internal exile because you couldn't have any kind of public position, any kind of public profession within the military, parliament, the church, the university, unless you foreswore loyalty to the Stuart, which he wasn't prepared to do.

So he was lonely politically.

He was lonely socially for that reason, partly.

And then there was perhaps the worst thing of all and very much the background emotionally to Messiah, which was the way one of his brothers died, his sole surviving brother, when Jennings was 28 and his brother Robert was studying for the bar at the Middle Temple.

cut his throat and threw himself out of the window.

Now, of course, the suicide of one's brother would be a terrible thing for anybody, but it was particularly, I think, terrible for Jennings because by taking his own life, Robert was cutting himself off from salvation after death.

Ask the majority of the population in Britain at that time, were they Christian?

They would say yes.

If you were Christian, you believed that there was judgment at death and then there was hell or heaven.

If you had taken your own life, there was hell.

So Jennings was saddled with this terrible recognition that probably his brother would be rotting in hell forever.

So it's no surprise that Messiah begins with the word comfort.

The second part of Messiah, behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world, the whole world.

And finally, I know that my redeemer liveth is how the final part ends.

And all through, we are being told that all shall be saved.

And Handel, in a crucial chorus, repeats that.

Shall all, shall all be saved.

So there's a very personal reason, I think, underlying his libretto.

And also there was a war on.

And so, you know, Italian singers weren't that easy to get.

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